MANUSCRIPT: HCL (H 50). Pencil.

PUBLICATION: LH 128-129.

Members of the "Mollie Maguires," a secret organization of Irish miners in Pennsylvania, were hanged for various outrages on four occasions between June 1877 and 14 January 1879. This letter, thanking Mrs. Holland for her annual Christmas gift of a box of chocolates, may have been written in mid-January. The "rectification of his Frontier" was a phrase used by Beaconfield in a speech on Lord Mayor's Day, November 1878, and refers to India's northwest frontier.